Week of 2026-04-20

Hey everyone, I'm back! I'm super stoked to get back into these journals.

I apologize (mostly to myself) for the hiatus, but I assure you it was for many great reasons. Let me tell you about them!

In The Interim

Here's what I've been up to:

ATmosphereConf 2026

A bonafide life-changing event. I won’t go into a lot of detail about it here, both because I already wrote a blog post about it and I don’t want to tear up right now. Please give it a read:

ATmosphereConf 2026 Is Not Over | Offprint

A not-retrospective of ATmosphereConf 2026

A Mini Vacay

I used to visit Vancouver with my parents every year, so my secondary conference goal was to drag my spouse to all of the highlight spots I could fit in our schedule. Here’s what we hit:

Nemesis Coffee

Granville Island

Capilano Suspension Bridge

Museum of Anthropology at UBC

We also saw Project: Hail Mary at a theater, and spent some time walking the beach. It was a wonderful respite.

COVID

Speaking of (re)spite, the conf bit back once I got home. I was fortunate that my symptoms were extremely mild, but I know that lots of folks fared worse than me.

I was a little stressed out, because both my spouse and I had things to do!

ATProto PDX’s Inaugural Meetup

For example, I had a meetup to run! Fortunately, I got my two negative tests in the nick of time.

ATmosphereConf 2026 revealed that there were a lot of atproto-interested folks based in/near Portland. Within a week and a half of the conf, a handful of us planned and held our very first meetup.

The event went so much better than we could have imagined, especially with such short lead-up. I never imagined that there were so many atproto-curious folk in town. I'm excited to help the scene blossom!

@timtrautmann.com wrote a great writeup about the event:

The nerds are building a new internet, and I could feel it in the room

The AT Protocol is a quiet attempt to rebuild social software the way email was built — open, portable, owned by no one. A meetup in Portland this week made the stakes feel real.

Our next meetup is on May 5th--I hope to see you there!

World of Coffee 2026

This was the event stressing Morgan out. She needed to be well so she could serve coffees at the big annual coffee convention--fortunately she recovered on time as well.

This year's WoC was a whirlwind. I'm fortunate to be able to attend annually with Onyx Coffee Lab . This year, the convention was held in San Diego. Neither of us had been down there before.

I have a great time every year, but this year I felt more present. I didn't have as many things to do or to help with, so it was a lot of standing around... But I handled the social interactions much better than in years prior. I'm chalking that up to ATmosphereConf.

Ludum Dare 59

Once we were back from San Diego, it was straight into a game jam I'd been planning to attend with friends for months.

If you don't know what Ludum Dare is, it's an event where you make a game with as many from-scratch components as possible in a limited window of time.

The original format is to make everything yourself in 48 hours, but there's a more forgiving 72 hour format where you can opt of the categories you're disqualified in. That's the one my friends and I usually enter.

This year, the theme was signal, and we made an absolute fever dream of a game. I'm very proud of it. You can play it here:

Vibe Check

Check Vibes. Hold on to your phone. Save us all.

I produced the music, did the foley, and recorded every voice line except for one.

My buddy @liminal.rip wrote up a postmortem for this jam, reflecting on our growth as gamedevs over the years. There's good life advice in it, so give it a read:

My Friends and I Made Another Game in 72 Hours - admin's log

Ludum Dare 59 retrospective

Skyboard

Notably, we did all of our task tracking using @disnetdev.com 's Skyboard . It worked remarkably well! The app does a lot of heavy lifting to enable collaboration between so many folks on a single board. The worst problems we encountered were just out-of-sync issues that were fixed by reloading. I'd recommend giving it a try!

The Future?

@distraction.engineer is the caretaker of Ludum Dare, and they announced that Ludum Dare will eventually come to an end .

In their post, they mention that they would love to see a successor to LD from the community! At the risk of sounding completely atproto-brained, I think AT Protocol would be a perfect fit for running game jams and hackathons. If only I had the bandwidth to take that on...

Oh well. We'll put it in the project backlog.

at://seattle's Inaugural Meetup

Why stop at attending one city's first atproto meetup when you can attend two?

I'm not a stranger to attending Seattle meetups at this point, so when @quillmatiq.com announced their first atproto community meetup, I committed to attending to show my support.

I took the train up, and we spent the day hanging out until the meetup. Just like the PDX event, the Seattle meetup went even better than imagined!

I'm completely smitten with attending these meetups. Every time, there's just so much excitement in the room. People are building incredible things both on and around the protocol, and I feel so strongly that I need to be a part of it.

Okay, I think that brings me up until about last Saturday. My heart is so full.

What's Next?

At the conference, I told lots of folks that I'd help them or work on specific things in the ecosystem. New commitments have also come up in the meantime.

Now that travel has slowed down, I can get back to work. Here's a list of things on my radar in no particular order:

Solving "profiles" on protocol. Lots of interest from folks on this; I've got a bunch of calls I need to schedule. Read this article to get an idea of the issue.

ATProto PDX ! I'll do my best to keep the conversation flowing and to help build a great community.

Voice/group calls using atproto identity, via MOQ . This is relevant to microclimate, another atproto-based, voice-first Discord alternative I'm working on.

atmo.gifts, a giveaway site I'm working on for running raffles. Hopefully this will be shipped by the next ATProto PDX meetup , so it can power our ticket raffle!

atmo.bingo; bingo on protocol. I've told folks in the Letta office hours that I'd make a bingo card for @cameron.stream , and I've been harassed about it for months now (understandable lmao). I've got a half-working prototype that needs cleanup.

atp.pics , the project I launched immediately before ATmosphereConf that equipped me to complain about profiles. It could use a little more love to fulfill its promise.

headway.page, a KOReader Sync host that stores reading progress on-protocol and syncs with Popfeed. All you Xteink-heads can thank @tynanpurdy.com for putting me up to this.

Helping @chrisshank.com automate at://news Atmospheric Weather Reports , while retaining editorial agency.

morkdeck , my CLI slideshow generator. My goal is to swap the markup lang to either MDX or Comark, add support for @inlay.at , and get the slides on protocol.

I've certainly missed some stuff, but I think you get the picture.

More Blogging...?

If you looked through my ATmosphereConf post, you'll notice that it's hosted on Offprint . Notably, that's not Leaflet, where you're reading these notes and perhaps where you've read my previous blog posts.

I'm a huge fan of both publishing services, for different reasons! They each have their strengths: Offprint has strong professional vibes and great viewership stats/tracking, while Leaflet has a top-notch editor and is a great place for serial content like these notes.

Notably, there's one standard.site contributor I've left out... @pckt.blog ! I'm feeling better about my writing than ever, and I don't want them to miss out on the fun--so it feels like the right time to start publishing over there as well.

I plan to write about my thoughts on music, tech, and miscellaneous gear and gadgetry. I'm not convinced I can write a lot of that while getting all my other things done, but pckt seems to be the right home for that kind of content. A friendly, cozy publication (in my head) feels right.

Maybe that will change over time, but I'll just have to feel it out. The best part? If I ever want to shuffle things around, standard.site records should be a big help.

Alright, that's enough notes for now. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you have a great week!